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The Department of Information Technology strives to support improvements in education by delivering high quality technology support and solutions to the Hampshire College community.it.hampshire.eduwww.hampshire.edu

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CMS Migration: RedDot to Drupal

Hampshire College has been using the RedDot content management system since 2007 to maintain the college website. Technological advances make it both necessary and desirable for Hampshire to migrate to a new content management system.

Hampshire IT has looked into a number of different content management systems, including an upgraded version of RedDot, as a possible replacement and has determined Drupal to be the best option for the following reasons:

Drupal is open source, free software

Drupal technology is such that our existing staff can easily learn, use, and customize the software

Drupal is being used at the other four colleges in the Five College consortium

Drupal can be customized to fit Hampshire’s website needs

What this means for our content authors:

We will automatically move content from the existing Hampshire website into Drupal, so they will not have to do that themselves. This means that everyone should keep updating content as usual and NOT wait until Drupal is in place.

We will provide training sessions in 2014 for them to learn how to use Drupal.

Drupal’s interface will be different from RedDot, but we think that our content authors will find it to be a significant improvement.

What this means for everyone else:

The design of the website is not changing at this point in time, so many folks may not even notice the slight differences

The URL structure will be more friendly

The navigation will also be more friendly

IT and communications staff are in the process of learning Drupal, setting up the system structure, and planning the content migration. As we move forward we will have a better idea of what our migration timeline and training schedule will be like and we will be in contact with our content authors as we progress.